I first fell in love with Keats when I was an English major at Louisiana State University.
Each week, I walked up the steps at O.K. Allen Hall, named for Huey Long's main crony, to go to the office of a professor whose name I've sadly forgotten. She spoke with a proper and forbidding British accent, and always wore a formal dress. I learned over that semester in southern Louisiana's gorgeous springtime of her kindness and humor.
I took a class in Keats' work from the lovely lady, in which I was the only student. Each week, we discussed Keats' poems and letters. She told anecdotes about the young poet, as if she'd been a member of his circle in early 19th century London.
On the 202nd anniversary of Keats' death in a small apartment overlooking Rome's Spanish Steps, I look back on that young student. I was not quite 25, the age at which Keats died of tuberculosis, believing himself forgotten.
As with Melville, Keats was rediscovered posthumously. Now, he's the best remembered Romantic poet, subject of a continuing stream of books.
Over the years, I visited the place where Keats died in the care of painter Joseph Severn, and his grave at Rome's Protestant Cemetery with its bitter epitaph, "Here lies one whose name was writ in water." I've also gone to the home in London where he fell in love with Fanny Brawne, wrote his great odes and walked along the Hampstead Heath.
Soon to turn 72, I've never stopped reading his poems.
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